Day: January 6, 2016

25 Years 25 Games: A Celebration of the Super Nintendo

/ skoce / 1 Comment

The Super Nintendo, the greatest video game system to ever exist, at least until this point, was released in the USA on August 23, 1991. 2016 marks its 25th anniversary. To celebrate, I’ve decided to beat 25 SNES games that I’ve either never played or at least never beaten. Some of the games I have chosen are classics that I just never managed to play, like Contra 3 or Super Mario RPG, others are hidden gems, like Skyblazer or Robotrek. Throughout the year I am going to try to beat these games and chronicle my attempts to play them. If I manage to get some sort of streaming going I might stream some of this, but otherwise I will just be writing about my experiences here.

I do have a list of games I intend to cover, though I do not have it whittled down to exactly 25 games, nor do I have the order that I plan to play them completely mapped out. Being the math expert that I am, I realize that I need to do two games a month, with one extra, to get them all done in a year. Here is the list:

  • Run Saber
  • Super Bomberman
  • Sparkster
  • Gradius 3
  • Contra 3
  • R-Type 3
  • Lufia
  • Lufia 2
  • DoReMi Fantasy
  • Space Megaforce
  • Radical Dreamers
  • Skyblazer
  • Illusion of Gaia
  • Terranigma
  • Magical Quest
  • Uncharted Water
  • Super Mario RPG
  • Saturday Night Slam Masters
  • Secret of Evermore
  • Legend of the Mystical Ninja
  • Joe and Mac
  • Death and Return of Superman
  • Actraiser
  • Wild Guns
  • Robotrek
  • Pocky & Rocky 2

I know I’m starting with Super Bomberman and that I’ll get to Super Mario RPG sooner rather than later, but otherwise my only plan is to spread out the RPGS, for obvious time related reasons.

It is kind of amazing that I could call a system my favorite of all time and still make a list of games such as above. There are some widely acclaimed classics on that list. It isn’t that I didn’t play a lot of SNES games, but I was pretty late to the SNES party to have the time to play everything the system had to offer before I and everyone else moved on to the PS1 or N64. I didn’t get an SNES until 1997, when the systems life was rapidly fading. I still spent a couple of years doing nothing but playing SNES games, but it wasn’t long before the siren’s song of Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time grew too tempting.

Now, 25 years after the SNES first graced our shores, I feel the desire to dig deep into it library and really see all that the system had to offer. Not that 25 more games to the ones I’ve already played is all the system’s library, but it is a good start. Now it is time to play with super power.